Thirty-five
years ago in October 1966 I drove retired Duke professor H. Shelton
Smith (then revising a book on racism in southern white religion)
from Durham down to Georgia. For me the purpose of the trip was
to visit the library at the Interdenominational Theological Center
at Atlanta University where I was looking for sources for my dissertation
subject, the white Methodist abolitionist and anti-racist reformer
Gilbert Haven (born over in Malden in this state).1 While I did not succeed in finding many connections
to Havens life, I had my first glimpse at historical sources
of African-American Christian traditions.2 The following summer (1967) while living
and working at ITC I was virtually overwhelmed by the multiplicity
of materials which we moved from the Gilbert Haven Library on
the old Gammon Theological Seminary campus and reclassified for
the new librarys collection. One example of such sources
which became part of what we called then the librarys Negro
Church History collection was W. E. B. Du Boiss personal
copy of the AME Church Magazine published between 1840
and 1848 and still little known and used by researchers. My essential
point in this reminiscence is to recount my first significant
engagement with the literature of and about African-American Christianitya
topic which figures prominently in Eddie Glaudes study,
Exodus!3

A second story: Thirty years
ago when the American Academy of Religion convened in Atlanta
in November 1971, one of its plenary speakers was Vincent Harding.
His talk, The Afro-American Experience as a Source of Salvation
History, stunned his audience of mostly white scholars.
We all struggled with the sense that a familiar American and yet
somehow unfamiliar American story was being narrated which did
not compute with our prior assumptions. Perhaps especially threatening
was Hardings line to the effect thatif the God of
his African forefathers (he would add foremothers today) was not
also the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, then the Jews and the
Christians could have him.4
My own response was that we should have sat in silence for a long
time in order to take in what had been presented, but as you might
expect from us anxious academics there was little chance of that.
The exclusionary threat was later reinforced in the meeting when
the Society for the Study of Black Religion held sessions open
to all for the presentations but closed for African Americans
only for the discussion of those papers. I tell this story in
part to connect with the next one but also to link to an earlier
version of what Glaude calls salvific history (94)
which represented Hardings language that night and his agenda
that brought forth a decade later his books The Other American
Revolution and There Is A River.5

A third
story: Beginning in the early 1970s, the famous sociologist of
religion Robert Bellah came to Denver several times for lectures
and conferences to discuss the civil religion debate
growing out of his famous essay from 1967 and then his national
bicentennial book The Broken Covenant.6 Offering a new take on Rosseaus term
civil religion and rethinking Durkheim in terms of
religion and nation in the United States, Bellah introduced to
me the schema of biblical archetype but not biblical content,
or biblical paradigm with American national experience as the
content. While hosting him in Colorado, I tried several times
to engage him about what I had found, triggered by reading Benjamin
Quarless Black Abolitionists,7 about the pre-Civil War black tradition of
freedom celebrations. Expanding on what Quarles had surveyed generally,
I had by 1973 done the research for a piece on the freedom celebrations
from 180863 which was later published in the Journal
of Negro History.8
I gave Bellah the unpublished draft I had been presenting for
several conferences but it was a failed effort in terms of getting
his attention.

I was
trying to communicate that there was something else going on in
this country between Bellahs first time of crisis (the Revolution
of 1776) and his second time of crisis (the Civil War) in which
another kind of America was being envisioned and acted out by
free black people in the North. I cannot know to what extent (anticipating
the discussion of David Blights book) growing up in 1940s
and 1950s South Carolina affected my ability to detect another
nationality, which we regularly celebrated in white
schools on Confederate Memorial Day. Recent explorations into
my family history yield three great-grandfathers and one great-great
grandfather fighting for the Confederate nation in the Civil War.
Be that as it may, for my future work in African-American religious
history, I was fortunate to have mentors and allies like Preston
Williams and David Wills and, through hearing them speak and reading
their work, Charles Long and Lawrence Jones, and after meeting
him about 1975 Vincent Harding. Those of you who have followed
Bellahs work know that Harding has been the most consistent
critic of his later formulations of voices and traditions in US
culture as in Habits of the Heart which ignore or too simply
assimilate the black national voice or voices.9 Eddie Glaudes book now occupies some
of that turf which is the subject of our panel.

Re-reading African-American Exodus

Exodus! is a work with a complex interdisciplinary
orientation. Glaudes book is in dialogue with at least four
scholarly contexts: African-American studies in history, literature
and political thought; the history of US and of African-American
religion from 17801850; public philosophy engaging the issues
of race and culture; and critical literary and communication theory
offering new readings to specific often well-known speeches and
publications from the period.10
Through these cross-disciplinary engagements Glaude examines the
complicated nature of African-American national consciousness
which emerged during and after the First Emancipationthe
gradual freeing of slaves across the northern states. Throughout
there is creative interplay between interpretive frameworks and
texts (like David Walkers Appeal), between interpretive
frameworks and institutional developments (as in the emergence
of independent black churches for example) and between interpretive
frameworks and public ritual and deliberation (occurring in freedom
celebrations and the national colored convention movement).

The
primary metaphor, as the title including its exclamation mark
indicates, for this African-American nationality is the biblical
narrative of the ancient Israelite exodus. Here Glaude reinterprets
Michael Walzers work on exodus and revolution which, he
notes, had but a single African-American reference to the theme.
To contrast with such European-American versions of nationality
and nationhood Glaude expands on the work of one of his teachers,
Al Raboteau. In 1994 Raboteau identified a distinctive African-American
appropriation of exodus which presents an alternative Christian
America related to but distinct from a European American version
of Christian America.11

This
book is divided into two parts: Exodus History and Exodus Politics.
The introductions allusion to strangers in a strange
land echoes Charles Longs phrase locating one of three
chief features of African-American collective history as formative
for comprehending black religious lifethe involuntary
presence of the black community in America.12 In that context Glaude makes the claim No
other story in the Bible has quite captured the imagination of
African Americans like that of Exodus (3). Then he states
his intention to explore the ways the story became a source
for a particular use of nation language . . . as well
as a metaphorical framework for understanding the middle passage,
enslavement, and quests for emancipation (3). After differentiating
his perspectives on nationality and on exodus from Eugene Genovese
and Walzer, Glaude affirms an earlier definition of black nationalism
as best expressed in racial solidarity.

In his
second chapter Glaude turns his attention to how the nation
is imagined not alongside religion but precisely through the precepts
of black Christianity and how it is embodied institutionally
in the independent black church. Drawing on Evelyn Brooks Higgenbothams
phrase the public dimension of the black church, but
locating his definition of publics in John Deweys philosophy,
he can speak of the churchs role as a formed public. After
recounting some of the historical events that depict the rise
of the independent black churches, and thus inevitably discussing
the gallery incident in late-eignteenth-century Philadelphia,
Glaude locates the church along with other voluntary associations
and (in a later chapter) the national convention movement in expanding
the dimensions of a black political public in the North
(91).

He then
reinterprets DuBois in two respects. First he recasts Du Boiss
formulation of double-consciousness and substitutes
for that dialectic Hortense Spillerss phrase structure
of ambivalence. Secondly, Glaude takes on Du Boiss
depiction of black religion in Souls of Black Folk as characterized
by either a form of deep religious fatalism and a pragmatically
driven social ethic, or by other-worldly escapism
alongside a this-worldly sense of racial advocacy
(30). Using Raboteau on slave religion as a corrective and situating
Du Boiss observations historically in the new dilemmas facing
late-nineteenth-century blacks, Glaude advances his goal of freeing
the black religious dynamic from static stereotypes. That move
enables him to return to the early nineteenth century, initially
to highlight Daniel Cokers conflation of the African church
movement with I Peter 2:91013
in his publication of 1810 (34), and then to a sustained and impressive
rereading of David Walkers Appeal (3443). For
Glaude, Walkers text demonstrates the inseparable
linkage between black religious life and black political activity
(42).

Exodus, Race, and the Politics
of Nationchapter 3offers us another theoretical
formulation of the process by which the God of the ancient Israelite
exodus becomes the God of oppressed black people. To achieve that
link Glaude borrows Werner Sollors typological ethnogenesisthe
sense of peoplehood that emerged through the hermeneutic of biblical
typology (42). For comprehending the European American archetype
of exodus, Glaude shows how Sacvan Berkovitch recasts the Puritan
errand into the wilderness and its later reshaping
via revivalism and colonial war into the American ideology
with its ultimate expression tying the rights of personal
ascent to the rite of social assent (47). By positing America
as the New Canaan from Puritanism to its transformation in the
Revolution of 1776, Glaude, drawing on a Vincent Harding quotation,
can then set up the African-American reversal of the Exodus with
Egypt as the US, the seat of Pharoah located in the national capital
and the black Old Israel present in the midst of the European
American New Israel (48). It is in this context that Glaude first
calls attention to how the racial color code of white
is central to the construction of the American ideological consensus
(52).

In chapter 4 Glaude takes us
to the political heart of the Exodus analogy in his pragmatic
reformulation of race as a sociological category and of nation
language as the basis for an ethical confrontation against
the racist practices of white America. The Second Great
Awakening, the rise of the independent churches and the formation
of the first black newspapers enabled African Americans to deepen
their Exodus vocabulary and express it in religio-political channels.
But those developments also enable us, Glaude believes, to chart
the shifting uses of words like nation and race from an earlier
to a later context between 1780 and 1850. Following the rise in
the 1830s of scientific racism popularized by writers in the American
School of Anthropology, race, Glaude insists, meant something
different when rooted in a false biology than it had previously
meant either as benevolent environmental accounts of racial
differences (67) or even as cruder but not yet scientific
versions of the radical otherness of blacks (68).
A similar shift in the meanings came to be associated with the
idea of nation especially as it merged into an American ideology
of chosenness and manifest destiny with its own racist and chauvinistic
form. As dominant as that paradigm was, however, it had to coexist
with an emergent African-American nationality with its Exodus
theology which was confident that the God active in history
who delivered Israel would surely deliver the oppressed in the
United States (81).

In The Nation and Freedom
Celebrationshis fifth chapterGlaude imaginatively
links Catherine Bells theory of ritual to the antebellum
African-American commemorations of the end of the foreign slave
trade in 1808, the abolition of slavery in the state of New York
and the August first holiday honoring West Indies emancipation
beginning in 1834.14 These public expressions
of black nationality demonstrated the making and remaking of certain
forms of power relations both within black civil society
(16, 18) and within the larger US context. Such commemorative
activity gave orators the occasion to draw on collective memory,
to narrate the black Exodus saga and thus to inject into the larger
public discourse an African-American countermemory
to the master narrative in which the US was not figured as Canaan
but as Egypt (83ff.). The themes of Africa, the middle passage,
the brutality of slavery were crucial elements of the black Exodus
narrative but typically orators also gave thanks for the event
being celebrated and articulated the duties of the black nation
and of its white allies. The repetitive nature of these rituals
created a calendrical critique of the US where attention
could be directed to counterideological acts which were regularly
occurring in the ongoing freedom struggle.

The January first sermon of Absalom
Jones in Philadelphia in 1808 confirms how the biblical Exodus
narrative both consciously and unconsciously shaped black nation
language (45). Absalom Joness
analogical use of Exodus, Glaude writes,

. . . presupposed (and simultaneously created)
the corporate unity of the participants while reorganizing memories
of Africa in the construction of an African American identity.
. . . Here Gods activity in history (salvific
history) becomes the basis for rereading the past and mobilizing
memories in a dialectical relation with more secular accounts
of history. Africa is reread; the middle passage and slavery
are reread; America is reread; and aspirations for freedom and
citizenship are formulated as divinely sanctioned ends (94).

The dynamism of such reading strategies harmonized with other
basic elements of the celebration ritual which Glaude, joining
Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic, considers as distinctive
in generating a black national tradition concerned not only with
recollection and memory but also with projection
and anticipation (101).

In part two, Exodus Politics,
three chapters interpret the convention movement, the American
Moral Reform Society and the famous address by Henry Highland
Garnet at the national convention of 1843. In chapter six Glaude
finds in the early colored conventions beginning in 1830 a primary
institutional effort to debate from within the public vocabulary
of the black Exodus narrative the pressing issues around emigration
posed by the program of the American Colonization Society and
by terrorist threats from white mobs.15
Over the next five years alongside the new abolitionist agitation
the focus of the conventions came to be on mental and moral
improvementan orientation Glaude recasts in Evelyn
Brooks Higgenbothams phrase the politics of respectability
and rereads as a form of cultural politics that assumes
the importance of self-determination (118, 124).

Along the same lines Glaude in
chapter seven reinterprets the role of William Whipper and the
American Moral Reform Society, which was one (but not the only)
successor after 1835 to the colored convention movement. Acknowledging
that the AMRS was an important test case of the dangers of reducing
racial discrimination to the private sphere, (127)
he contends that its founders self-help philosophy and apparent
effort to transcend race should be understood in the context of
the new scientific racism and of a dominant proslavery ideology
powerful in both North and South [Tise]. While reinforcing his
own preference for a pragmatic view of race found in Whippers
most astute critics, Glaude nonetheless is able to rehabilitate
Whippers point of view as belonging to the immanent
conversation about racism (127) within free black communities.16

In the
final chapter Glaude offers his take on Garnets Address
to the Slaves as an example of what Walzer calls political
messianism. But even the alternative of the call to violence
with its own echoes in the Old Testament has its Exodus symbology,
so Glaude quotes Garnet: If you must bleed, let it all come
at once, rather die freemen, than live to be the slaves. It is
impossible, like the children of Israel, to make a grand exodus
from the land of bondage. The Pharaohs are on both sides of the
blood-red waters! (156). That passage which gave Glaude
his title for chapter 8 also framed the motif of his epilogue
and its theme the tragedy of African-American politics.
In his penultimate paragraph he says of that theme:

. . . I read Henry Highland Garnets
address as exposing the tragic sense of life at the heart of
African American politics: the fact that we are constantly having
to choose either to identify ourselves with this fragile democracy,
struggling for its soul, or to define ourselves over and against
itand live with the consequences of such choices without
yielding to despair. Pharaoh or some such evil is indeed on both
sides of the blood-red waters (167).

Amplifications of Historical Motifs
in Exodus!

I want
to say up front how much I like Glaudes work for its contribution
to revising historical perspectives. What a terrific cover he
and his associates at the University of Chicago selected in the
Aaron Douglas painting! I have been amazed in observing his mind
at work as I have read now three versions of this manuscript.
Perhaps implicating me in some respects in the final product which
the book represents, that process certainly reduced the number
of critical issues I might have raised with respect to earlier
drafts. There are, however, three areas of historical inquiry
I would call attention to for possible discussion.
I first suggest that by passing over the specific terms of the
contested nature of the ecclesiastical exodus which gave rise
to the independent churches, Glaude risks missing a crucial feature
of the achievement they represent. Paying attention to the mundane
aspects of church polity as the contested arena in the ecclesiastical
exodus would have permitted a stronger tie of that early form
of exodus politics to his later discussion of race politics focusing
on conventions and the American Moral Reform Society. His discussion
makes the AME Church too representative of a much broader cross-denominational
phenomenon of African-American religious nationality which is
to be differentiated from while usually in tension with European
American Christianity. Secondly, I want to press the case for
the pre and post 1830 black abolitionist movement to be reevaluated
as practical work in black nation building, and not to see it
swallowed up in a coalitional but white dominated antislavery
movement. As a third issue, I call for more attention to the black
state conventions and ask how exodus politics might also be present
in African-American involvement in electoral contests involving
the antislavery political parties beginning in the 1840s and in
that sense anticipating Reconstruction.

As I
did the research for an essay on The Rise of African Churches,
my first initiation into the use of the word exodus
in the antebellum northern free black context was to read the
term in a denominational history by James H. Hood, the AME Zion
Bishop, and former Union chaplain and Reconstruction politician
in North Carolina. Written a century after the emergence of separate
black Methodist societies in New York, Hoods work referred
to this cross-denominational development of the late eignteenth
and early nineteenth century as a massive exodus of
black people from the biracial Christian churches.17 What struck me, besides the historiographical
debate about how to account for the origins of the independent
churches and of their emerging complex public role both issues
of which Glaude cogently addresses, was how political the contests
and contestants were within this ecclesiastical exodus.
When I wrote about it in 1984, the documents forced me to focus
on church polity debates. In them African-American Christians
were pressing for access to ordination, representation in
denominational governance, consultation about pastoral appointments
and services, the ownership and use of church property and participation
in congregational discipline.18

In chapter 3 Glaude captures
the general sense of this development with the analogy to the
first effective stride toward freedom among African Americanswhat
I want to call the first covenantal convening of the nation.
I have no quarrel with that way of putting things or of the insightful
expansion of the point in the quotation from David Wills about
AME church patriotism (5758). My only caveat
is to reiterate the church-specific terms of this form of exodus
politics and of the repetitive nature of the process of independence.
It kept occurring here and then there and then somewhere else
over a long period of time, and it always contained implicit if
not explicit expressions of black religious nationality far beyond
the boundaries of one denomination, the AME Church.

What is at stake here perhaps
is to clarify how the gallery incident in Philadelphia was paradigmatic
for the emergence of independent churches (57). Even though Richard
Allen writes in his autobiography after the offense by the white
trustees as if there was to be no more relationship with white
Methodists and particularly St. Georges Church, in fact,
as Glaude mentions, by 1794 he has Bishop Francis Asbury to dedicate
his Bethel building. He is involved with a white Methodist named
Jupiter Gibson in biracial revivals at both Bethel and St. Georges
in 1798. And all along he is maintaining his Bethel congregation
in fiercely competitive encounters with the white elders at St.
Georges leading finally to congregational independence and
denominational formation in 1816. Even as the separation occurs,
Allen and his colleagues remained decidedly Methodist in order
to symbolize the integrity of their original choices which, in
their view, were violated by the failure of the white church to
honor those choices appropriately.19

The AME Church, of course, was
just one of four antebellum black Methodist denominational secessions
occurring alongside African Union in 1813, AME Zion in 1822 and
Colored Methodist Protestant by the 1840s. Prior to the Civil
War there were also separate black Baptist congregations, associations
and the American Baptist Missionary Convention, a caucus of African-American
Episcopalian churches and priests and a Congregational-Presbyterian
black proto-denomination which expressed the same struggles and
successful embodiments of black religious nationality. Embracing
the denominational paradigm, all of these black church organizations
surrendered any easy notion that a single union church
could express their religious impulses. Thus in their denominational
diversity they became what E. Franklin Frazier recognized, and
Glaude in other ways confirms, a nation within a nation.
In so doing, the independent church movement solidified black
Christianity not as an imitation of white Christian doctrine and
discipline but as a distinct, hard won achievement dialectically
related to European and indigenous traditions of American Christianity.
The outcome set up the interpretive problem ever since about how
to characterize what Carter Woodson called The Negro Church.20

A second set of issues: Benjamin
Quarles long ago, William and Jane Pease somewhat later and Peter
Ripley more recently in the Black Abolitionist Papers project
contend for the priority of a pre 1830s black abolitionist movement.
It was shaped in the battle against colonization and by 1830 it
was ready to influence emerging white activists who had to rethink
their antislavery commitment and their tendency to unconscious
forms of white racism when they came into contact with and were
confronted by free blacks.21
In dialogue with Glaude, I would ask: how was the emerging paradigm
of black nation with its countercultural energy crucial to the
possibility of black and later white and biracial forms of abolitionism?
Ripley affirms that the distinguishing feature of black abolitionism
was its focus on practical workreminiscent of Carol Georges
argument that the form of antislavery activism emerging from the
black church was practical abolitionism.22 Given Glaudes evocation of a pragmatic
understanding of race, shouldnt the black abolitionist witness
be a more strongly featured element of building up the black nation?
Ripley reminds us of this sort of multifaceted work in the following
passage:

A black temperance gathering could
adjourn and immediately reconvene as an antislavery meeting with
no change in tenor or participants. A black lecturer could use
an antislavery tour to solicit donations for a fledging black
newspaper, a church building fund, or African missions. A black
vigilance committee, while aiding fugitive slaves, could also
organize a petition campaign for black voting rights. The range
and continuity of these activities redefined black abolitionism
to include much of northern black life, institutions, and culture.23

A third
theme: Glaude alludes to but does not press the point about how
the black state conventions from 1840 on became one arena for
race-based politics as African Americans sought to restore the
franchise in states-rights America where it had been lost (as
in Pennsylvania) or expand it in the new states or to revise restrictions
on it (as in New York and Ohio).24 Some of the constraint here, of course, is
the time-line with which Glaude works, stopping with the national
convention of 1843 with Garnet, but how might he and we think
beyond the Troy convention? The ongoing struggle for voting rights
and citizenship defined another form of free black involvement
in racial politics, even though again most of the developments
I am thinking about occurred after the mid 1840s. The first African-American
political candidates and office-holders (Samuel Ringgold Ward,
Frederick Douglass, William C. Nell, Robert Morris, John Mercer
Langston) occurred within the Liberty, Radical Abolitionist, Free
Soil and Republican parties.25
Such new opportunities, though hardly representative of the larger
currents of party politics at the time, surely influenced black
voters and white antislavery voters and candidates as well.26

Or to
push the time line into Reconstruction, how might we rethink out
of Glaudes model the free African-American encounter with
the freedpeople as the black Christian and black national mission
is extended into the postwar South? Since Reconstruction was a
national and not merely sectional phenomenon, we would have to
remember at the same time new rounds of political struggle in
the North and West for the extension and protection of black civil
and political rights. To remember Garnets powerful passage,
the struggle was always everywhere. But how does Glaudes
formulation of Exodus and black nationality play out after the
Civil War? To ask the question, of course, is to hope that Glaude
will not abandon his historical interests for public philosophy
or African-American religious thought but take us further on his
journey in forthcoming work.

Bibliography

Bellah, Robert N. The Broken Covenant.
New York: Seabury Press, 1975.

. Civil Religion
in America. Reprinted in Beyond Belief Essays on Religion
in a Post-Traditional World. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1991.

, et al. Habits
of the Heart: Individualism and Community In American Life.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.

Bercovitch, Sacvan. The American Jeremiad. Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1978.

. The Rites of Assent:
Transformations in the Symbolic Constructions of America.
New York: Routledge, 1993.

The Black Abolitionist Papers, vol. 3: The United States 18301846,
ed. C. Peter Ripley. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, n.d.

Fabre, Genevieve. African-American Commemorative
Celebrations in the Nineteenth Century. In History and
Memory in African-American Culture, ed. Genevieve Fabre and
Robert OMeally, eds., 7291. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1994.

George, Carol V. R. Widening the Circle:
The Black Church and the Abolitionist Crusade, 18301860.
In Antislavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Abolitionists,
7595. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979.

.  . . . many
of the poor Affricans are obedient to the faith: Reassessing
the Early African-American Presence in Methodism in the US, 17691809.
In Methodism and the Shaping of American Culture, ed. Nathan
O. Hatch and John H. Wigger, 17595. Nashville: Kingswood
Books, 2001.

Harding, Vincent. The Other American Revolution.
Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies; Atlanta: Institute
for the Black World, 1980.

. There Is A River:
The Black Struggle for Freedom in America. New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1981.

. Toward a Darkly
Radiant Vision of Americas Truth. In Community
in America: The Challenge of Habits of the Heart, ed. Charles
H. Reynolds and Ralph Norman. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1988.

Hizer, Trenton. Review of Glaudes Exodus!.
Journal of Church and State 43 (winter 2001): 15960.

Hood, James H. One Hundred Years of the
African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, or The Centennial of
African Methodism. New York: AME Zion Book Concern, 1895.

Tise, Larry. Proslavery: A History of the
Defense of Slavery in America, 17011840. Athens: University
of Georgia Press, 1987.

Walzer, Michael. Exodus and Revolution.
New York: Basic Books, 1985.

Werner, John M. Reaping the Bloody Harvest.
Race Riots in the United States during the Age of Jackson 18241849.
New York: Garland, 1986.

Notes

1. The possible
link was with Gammon Theological Seminary whose first president
was W. P. Thirkield, Havens son-in-law and later the last
white president, I believe, of Howard University. [return
to text]

2. Like other
graduate schools in religion of that era, Dukes curriculum
in the American Christianity Ph.D. program in which I was enrolled
(with the first African American graduate students to be admitted
to that program) was very white, and Protestant, and mostly male
in its conceptions of religious trajectories in US history. In
this time before C. Eric Lincoln came to Duke, I did not have
courses which discussed African-American religion, even though
I did write and later publish a paper on the emergence of the
Colored (now Christian) Methodist Episcopal Church for a course
on the Civil War and Reconstruction in Dukes History Department
[ The Social, Political and Religious Significance of the
Formation of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church (1870),
Methodist History 18 (October 1979): 325]. [return
to text]

4. I am not
aware of a printed version of this talk, though there was an audio-tape
of it available from the AAR which I bought and transcribed in
order to study. Hardings later book, The Other American
Revolution (Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies;
Atlanta: Institute for the Black World, 1980), now out of print,
presented an expansion of some elements of the AAR talk. My mention
of gender awareness is an issue Dwight Hopkins review of
Exodus! has raised in Journal of Religion 81 (July
2001): 46768. Twice Glaude quotes Maria Stewart, once echoing
the theme of exodus in Egypt and the other about black women and
the politics of respectability (910, 12122).
Otherwise gendered concerns are not front and center in this study.
[return to text]

5. Vincent
Harding, There Is A River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in
America (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981). [return
to text]

6. Robert
N. Bellah, Civil Religion in America, reprinted in
Beyond Belief Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), and The Broken
Covenant (New York: Seabury Press, 1975). [return
to text]

9. Robert
N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Community
In American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1985); Vincent Harding, Toward a Darkly Radiant Vision of
Americas Truth, in Community in America: The Challenge
of Habits of the Heart, ed. Charles H. Reynolds and Ralph
Norman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). [return
to text]

11. Albert
J. Raboteau, African-Americans, Exodus, and the American
Israel, reprinted in A Fire in the Bones: Reflections
on African-American Religious History (Boston: Beacon Press,
1995). [return to text]

13. But
ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, and an holy nation,
a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praise of him
who hath called you out of darkness into his marvelous light:
which in time past were not a people, but are now the people of
God: which had not obtained mercy; but now have obtained mercy
(34). [return to text]

14. The chronological
limitations with which Glaude works tend the diminish the significance
of the latter holiday with its larger Atlantic world commemoration.
There were West India celebrations in Canada, London, and Liberia,
and by 1859, it was observed in thirteen states in fifty-seven
different locations. See Genevieve Fabre, African-American
Commemorative Celebrations in the Nineteenth Century, in
History and Memory In African-American Culture, ed. Genevieve
Fabre and Robert OMeally (New York: Oxford University Press,
1994), 7291. [return to text]

15. See John
M. Werner, Reaping the Bloody Harvest: Race Riots in the United
States during the Age of Jackson 18241849 (New York:
Garland, 1986). [return to text]

16. Glaude
writes: For Whipper, race language acquired its meaning
only within the context of American racism, so any use of it merely
reinforced its hold of peoples moral and social imaginations
(141). [return to text]

17. James
H. Hood, One Hundred Years of the African Methodist Episcopal
Zion Church, or The Centennial of African Methodism (New York:
AME Zion Book Concern, 1895), 5; Sandy D. Martin, For God and
Race: The Religious and Political Leadership of AMEZ Bishop James
Walker Hood (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press,
1999). [return to text]

18. Will
B. Gravely, The Rise of African Churches: Re-Examining the
Contexts, 17861822, Journal of Religious Thought
41 (1984): 5873, 68. The contests over property use and
the importance of owning their own church property among the independent
churches occurred in the contexts of the enactment of incorporation
laws in the various states following the disestablishment of religion
from the 1780s on. The powers vested in trustees in these black
congregations solidified the ownership. Black church struggles
over trusteeism overlapped other similar contests in white Protestant
and Catholic cases during the same period. [return
to text]

19. Will
B. Gravely,  . . . many of the poor
Affricans are obedient to the faith: Reassessing the Early
African-American Presence in Methodism in the US, 17691809,
in Methodism and the Shaping of American Culture, ed. Nathan
O. Hatch and John H. Wigger (Nashville: Kingswood Books, 2001),
17595. [return to text]

20. One example
suffices. In his classic historical and sociological mid-twentieth-century
study, Protestant, Catholic, Jew (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday,
1955), Will Herberg confessed his inability to classify the black
churches. His concern was nonetheless with religion and nation
as he accounted for how European immigrant forms of the three
biblical faiths became Americanized by the mid-twentieth century
and transformed into the religion of the American way of
life. [return to text]

21. The
Black Abolitionist Papers, vol. 3: The United States 18301846,
ed. C. Peter Ripley et al. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, n.d.), 78. This broadened definition of black
abolitionism governed relations between black and white abolitionists . . . . The
enormous amount of time and energy that blacks spent trying to
convert fellow abolitionists and the northern public to their
larger goals meant that black abolitionism was as influenced as
much by its struggles with whites in the free states as with slaveholders
in the South (ibid., 68). [return to text]

22.Black
Abolitionist Papers,
3:24; Carol V. R. George, Widening the Circle: The Black
Church and the Abolitionist Crusade, 18301860, in
Antislavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Abolitionists
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 7595.
[return to text]

24. For a
recent summary and table 7.1 Black Rights to Vote by State (1830
and 1860), see James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, In Hope
of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest Among Northern Free
Blacks 17001860 (New York: Oxford University Press,
1997), 167ff. [return to text]

26. I have
in mind some of the events in New York state discussed in Douglas
M. Strong, Perfectionist Politics: Abolition and the Religious
Tensions of American Democracy (Syracuse: Syracuse University
Press, 1999). Ward ran for the New York state assembly in 1848
and as national vice president in 1850. Douglass was a candidate
for secretary of State in New York five years later. Nell was
nominated for the Massachusetts legislature and Morris sought
to become mayor of Boston. Langston was elected a town clerk in
Ohio. [return to text]